Creativity is a buzzword, both in business and in education. This kind of alignment of school and workplace values doesn’t happen as often as a novice might expect, so it is definitely a situation which educators should make the most of. But before we increase the focus on creativity in the classroom, we need to know what it means. In a recent #gtchat on Twitter, we discussed creative thinking, and I defined it as follows:

Creative thinking means generation, synthesis or refinement of ideas in ways which are unusual or interesting.

This was generally well received, and the generation of new and refined ideas and solutions is a key aspect of progress in any field. Students should all have the opportunity to learn about this kind of creative thinking, and to practise it often and well. Gifted students can go further, developing an understanding of what creative practice means within their domains of interest, as well as exploring which ways of approaching their work enhance their own creative productivity the most.

This kind of creativity, however, is definitely work. Often, it is the aspect of our work we love the most, but it is still work. The most perfectionistic and driven of our gifted children routinely work until they are very tired. In the interests of promoting self-care and work-life balance, I believe it is important to make time for “recreativity” in the classroom, too.

Creativity as recreation, because the work of rebuilding ourselves and our energy matters, too!

By recreativity, I mean hands on and joyful creation of “stuff”, whether original or not, in a way which may involve some learning, but is primarily lots of fun. Recreation. This kind of creativity relaxes children and recharges their batteries, ready for the next lot of serious learning. Gifted children have a reputation for intensity, and while intensities often empower, they can also overwhelm. We could worry about this, of course, and pathologise it, but short breaks in the goal-driven intensity of our classrooms are often sufficient to keep the children’s personal intensities manifesting in positive ways.

So please provide all the opportunities for creativity you can in your classroom, but balance it with a little recreativity as well. What’s more, if you are reading this as a gifted adult and sense the need for a little recreativity of your own, make sure to check out Brilliant Chaos, a Facebook group where creativity and recreativity are shared

A former student is not finding writing easy at present. However, he is an amazing young advocate for gifted education, and for many other good causes, so he wrote the words above, and he was pretty sure they wouldn’t be good enough. I have asked his permission to share them anyway, because I feel that these words are a profound metaphor for dual exceptionality.

This is what the tui tells me:

Twice exceptional (2e) students seldom experience the classroom as a place of relevance, acceptance or belonging.

Twice exceptional students see what they have to offer as being as out of place as birdsong in a classroom.

However, what twice exceptional students do have to offer will always be something we have no hesitation in admiring in an appropriate environment. Who among us does not enjoy birdsong outdoors?

The tui is such an apt choice for the metaphor. The sound of the word (which is just like 2e, for overseas readers) makes it work at first, but we can dig deeper.

In the video above, if you watch the tui singing, you will probably notice its beak moving silently at times. It is still singing! It can sing notes which most of us cannot appreciate, because they are beyond our range. This reminds me that we must gather data from many sources to appreciate just what our twice exceptional students can do. Our usual range of observations is likely to let us down. It is worth noting that this tui’s family can hear all the notes he sings.

A tui is also an excellent mimic. They have been known to copy referees’ whistles, telephones, the sounds of power tools, and the songs of other birds. While this has great entertainment value, we probably love tui best of all when they are just being tui, and singing tui songs. Do we send this same message to our 2e students, or do we require them to mimic other students in our classrooms, while failing to value their true selves?

Have you ever watched tui fly? The straight line, which we are told the crow flies, holds little interest for them. When tui fly for fun, they are iridescent, aerobatic speed machines. They take risks, wheel and dive, and experience flight to the fullest. Do we stand beside our 2e students as they aspire to lives which embody this kind of vibrant fullness?

It’s high time we did.

Credits: The tui image is the work of a former student who chooses not be named. The embedded video is by Tony Palmer.

Every Friday evening, my working week ends on a high note. On Fridays, I chat with the GO Storymakers. This is an amazing group of young people, some of whom I have known for a number of years, despite having never met them. One of my puzzles of practice as a teacher is just why this group gels so well. I have chosen to write about this because creating online courses is now becoming commonplace, but I believe that creating real communities of online learners is still a rarity.

I have shared this group, more than any of my other online groups of students, with another teacher, Wendy. I am increasingly convinced that having done so is part of the key to this group’s success. Wendy and I, you see, manage to be kindred spirits as well as being chalk and cheese. Our strengths are different and complimentary, but our philosophy of education is very much the same. Our long-standing Storymakers have seen us pop in and out of each other’s chat sessions and have brief collegial conversations with each other.

In doing so, we have modelled online sharing of work and friendship, and being the people we are, we have each been open about the ways in which the other has inspired us, right there in chat with our students. When we acknowledged the inspiration of each other’s different approach, we found a very authentic way to give our students permission to think divergently and to value differences.

We modelled seeking feedback, too, by asking each other to check over work we had produced for the students. “Why is that good teaching?” you may ask. We showed that having a go, however imperfect, is a necessary first step to getting the job done on time, even when one’s brave first attempt is visible to a peer. We also showed that seeking feedback to allow refinement is a positive action, not a form of defeat, and is just as normal and natural online as it is face-to-face.

Even though Wendy is not currently working with the Storymakers, she is still part of the GO whanau, and we still benefit enormously from the collaborative culture created by the team teaching which included her wonderful work. Thank you, Wendy Van Belle!

The GO Storymakers also have a community of parents. Parents do not always attend chats, but there is a virtual “open door”, so if they are near their child at the computer, they don’t need to pretend not to be there. Their constant warm support, their creative contributions to our conversations, and the excellent questions they ask at times, all help to enrich our virtual community of learners. Thank you, parents!

However, the Storymakers themselves never cease to amaze me. As individuals, they are creative. They show sustained commitment to their creativity, with several having been with us for a number of years. They trust each other sufficiently to take risks in their writing (or their story creation in other media). They acknowledge each other freely as sources of inspiration. They are unfailingly welcoming to the efforts of others, whether young and inexperienced, or having a bad writer’s block day. But somehow the whole is even greater than the sum of the parts. They have a creative synergy together which is subtly different from the ways in which they are individually creative. I have the privilege, every week, of seeing the interplay of these two kinds of creativity, and I love it. Thank you, GO Storymakers!

Online community is important for the adults who nurture gifted children too, so I will finish by acknowledging the #gtchat community on Twitter and the members of my Facebook group, Mary’s Gifted Contacts. These groups have sometimes confirmed and sometimes challenged my understandings of creativity and giftedness. They have shared everything from personal accounts to informative new research, bringing ideas from different nations and different paradigms. They are my Personal Learning Network, and have modelled many aspects of virtual community to me, in ways which have in turn benefitted my students. Thank you, PLN!

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Hamilton MindPlus students were asked to express, in very few words, what gifted children want from teachers, and what they value as learners. What they wrote was the high point of my day, and I hope you’ll love it just as much.

Gifted children have some inspiring advice for teachers:
Teach us, but do it right. Isobel.
Gifted students have great expectations – reach them. Leia.
My mind is a lion. Tame it. Isobel.
Leave my mind undomesticated, open and free. Thoughts are endless. Leia.
My mind is full of stars. Make constellations. Isobel.

Gifted children know about the very best teachers:
Our minds are like races. Teachers help us win. Leia.
Good teachers make students go “WOW!!” Jackson.
Teachers excite children with fantastic, brilliant ideas. Niamh.
Gifted kids say, “Cool! Some awesome teachers!” Finn.
Awesome teachers know how to make learning fun. Conor.
Gifted kids’ mums are often their best teachers. Bethan.
Good teachers create chances to make friends. Seb.

Gifted children love to question:
Who taught the sun to be bright? Leia.

I’m in the middle of my PhD. It’s not about giftedness or even anything to do with education, but rather it centres on urban poverty and food insecurity. I’m reading George Herbert Mead and Mary Douglas and David Sibley and Georg Simmell. I’m thinking around Mead’s notions of ‘the generalised other’ and how we apply them to the poor, considering how Douglas showcases our construction of ‘the other’ as dirty and unclean, learning that Sibley identifies numerous ways in which space and place are utilised in order to exclude, and all these ideas combine in our society today in a variety of ways that work to ostracise and dehumanise and dismiss those who are different.

And we, the gifted, are different. We see the world through unique lenses; we ask too many difficult questions; we refuse to accept pat answers; we persist in challenging the status quo. The world needs people like us to push past what is and to reveal what could be. The world need us to continue to provoke, to ask, to think in new and creative ways, to demand that our society can and does improve in multiple ways.

And yet, it is our very difference that sees us ‘othered’ and ostracised and made fun of and demeaned and dismissed.

I’m not sure what the answer is, or even if there is one. I’m two score years into my three score years and ten, and I’m only just now feeling comfortable in my own skin, including identifying as being gifted. My children too are gifted, but I’m not yet comfortable outing them as such. I know the pain of being the ‘other’ and it’s not a pain that I want to inflict on my (or any!) child. Instead I patiently advocate for their needs, support more vocal voices than mine, and quietly hope that we will become a more inclusive, compassionate society that values each and every one of us for who are, not how well we ‘fit in’ in our desperate attempts to avoid becoming the other.

Some of the gifted children I have taught seem to be ‘knowledge detectives’. Not only do they detect new knowledge, but these children seem to do so with a kind of stealth which an undercover cop would be proud of. Parents typically tell me that they have no idea where these children learn what they know, but they certainly know it isn’t coming from them.

“She just soaks up information like a little sponge.”

or

“He seems to attract information by magnetism.”

Over the years, I have learnt that the more adamant the parent is that the child does not learn from them, the more likely it is that an unspoken second message is also being sent. The second message is a little more concerning than the first. If anyone ever said it out loud, this is what it would be:

This situation is both puzzling and distressing for parents. Once the child enters the school system, it is likely that this child is not going to learn the material the school teachers have on offer, either. However, the child will keep learning all sorts of other things, seemingly by stealth.

A typical explanation is that this child is highly selective, even spoilt, and only learns what he or she wants to learn. However, I am fortunate enough to work with a negotiable curriculum. There is a time in each learning session when I can give children permission to learn exactly what they want to learn, and yet these same children are at first unable to use that opportunity to their advantage. I have become convinced that these children do not learn by stealth. They learn by accident. They don’t know when they are learning, or how they learn best, and they cannot decide to learn something and then settle to their task, no matter how interested they are in the subject matter. When they do learn, they learn very well, but the process is not within their control.

The response then, to our “knowledge detectives,” is to become learning detectives. As parents and teachers, we need to become very aware of all the different things which learning can look like, so that we can spot the merest hint of those learning behaviours in these children. Then we need to communicate what we see to the child.

“I can see how your eyes light up when you watch science videos like this one. You are paying close attention and thinking hard. That’s an excellent learning behaviour.”

“I saw how you took that apart, put it back together, and tried it again. You were evaluating the smoothness of the wheel motion, and you made lots of adjustments until you were satisfied with the result. You are teaching yourself a lot about how things work.”

“Look at your book. It’s getting quite worn around the edges. That’s because you have been willing to read it again and again. I bet you learnt a lot that way.”

Some parents also take photographs or videos of their child involved in learning behaviours. Some save fragments of writing, as these children are often reluctant writers, and also write down some of the stories their children tell them orally. In this way, they chronicle their child’s learning journey, creating a body of evidence that learning is occurring which they can discuss with their child. Teachers can and must do some similar things, to the extent which their busy workload allows.

Once we can detect the child’s learning, and can show them some evidence, learning doesn’t need to be a highly effective accident any more. It becomes a set of behaviours which can be recognised, understood, and soon also controlled by the child.

Gifted Awareness Week begins next Monday, on the 15th of June. If you find your child’s learning hard to detect, I challenge you to capture some evidence of learning behaviour this Gifted Awareness Week, and to use that evidence to celebrate his or her learning.Maybe you’d even like to blog about it.

A week from today, we’ll be starting the 5th #NZGAW Blog Tour. Can you believe it? And we do so with grateful thanks to everyone who has ever supported this event, as a blogger, a reader, a commenter, or a sharer of blog posts. Just in case you don’t know what this event is all about, there is some information below. The New Zealand Gifted Awareness Week Blog Tour is an opportunity for you to have your say about being or supporting a gifted child, about gifted education, about support or the lack of it from government, or about the way forward as you see it. Most people write opinion pieces, often as a call to action. One or two have written poems. Some share their research. Young people sometimes share experiences, encouraging others to seek out similar opportunities. Members of Parliament have always contributed in varying numbers, and at least one of them reads a selection of the blogs each year. You’ll probably be able to tell which one, if you read the political posts. If you’d like to contribute this year, here’s what you need to do:

Choose a picture which you own or can legally use. Insert this near the top of your post. This is important because most of our readers arrive via Facebook, and pictures make posts more visible on Facebook.

Also use the #NZGAW Blog Tour logo, but put that near the bottom of your post. Otherwise it will appear on Facebook, where our most loyal readers will think, “I don’t need to read that one. I’ve seen it before.”

Publish your post, on your own blog or by emailing it to me, on the day we agree on.

Enjoy your moment of fame, and support other bloggers in theirs, especially the children who contribute.

Please note that no post which shows disrespect to others in gifted education will be linked to the #NZGAW homepage, even if you have a prior agreement to contribute, or if you add the #NZGAW Blog Tour logo. Past blog tours can be visited at the links below:

There is an ongoing debate about whether or not the provision of one digital device to one student is worthwhile. While I have an opinion on that, in terms of gifted education, I think it is time to start another 1:1 debate. Quotas in the identification of gifted children are highly controversial, but I am not afraid of a little controversy. The bell curve is symmetrical, so what if schools routinely identified one gifted child for every struggling learner they identified?What if they had to meet that 1:1 quota, with no ifs, buts, maybes or excuses?

What if…?

Here are some things which might happen. You may like to add your own ideas in the comments below.

Schools which “don’t have any gifted children” and therefore don’t provide gifted education services, may discover that it is easier to begin identifying gifted children than it is to stop identifying other learners with special educational needs.

Schools who believe that “all children are gifted” (and therefore that everything they provide to suit all children suits the gifted) may find it harder to convince themselves that all children also struggle as learners.

Schools may begin identifying additional gifted children whose strengths lie outside the most frequently or easily assessed areas of the curriculum.

Creativity may be given more weight as an indicator of giftedness. The kind of evidence gathered about children’s learning may change to facilitate this shift.

Schools may begin asking interesting questions like, “Is it acceptable to identify the same child as both gifted and a struggling learner?”

Schools may realise that their children have cultural differences from what they had thought of as a “typical gifted child”. They may respond by investigating how giftedness manifests in a range of cultures.

Schools may analyse the gaps in who they are identifying as gifted in order to fill their quota. This may involve looking at gender and ethnic balance, month of birth, socioeconomic factors and language spoken at home.

Gifted education supporters who have very entrenched and exclusive views about who is gifted, particularly in a nature versus nurture way, may have to find merit in other viewpoints about who is gifted in order to meet quotas.

Sufficient gifted children will be identified that it will be logical to work with groups of gifted children at times. This will result in many gifted children feeling less isolated.

Cost effectiveness in provision of gifted education would become very important. The literature on grade skipping is likely to be dusted off. Grade skipping may become common enough that every grade skipped child meets others in the same situation.

It is likely to be acknowledged more widely that all teachers are teachers of the gifted, and need preservice training in meeting gifted children’s needs.

Catering for the profoundly gifted would need to be monitored carefully. They may be better served because of increasing awareness of giftedness. They may be worse served, through being treated exactly the same as other gifted children when they may have had personalised provisions before.

Yes, I have my rose coloured spectacles on, and I am mainly looking at what could go right. However, I feel that there is not enough optimism in our field, and that this holds us back from advocating for changes which could be very helpful. I firmly believe that we ought to be identifying far more children as gifted than we currently do. Why?

To help gifted children to “find their tribe” – the children and teachers who they can relate to best. This is of huge importance when so many gifted people, whether children or adults, experience distressing loneliness until they find others who enjoy thinking in similar ways.

To create groups of learners who willingly challenge each other and themselves to achieve more. I agree with Martin Seligman who draws our attention to the strong connections between succeeding in worthy challenges and self-esteem. Challenge is enormously important to all learners, and challenging gifted learners doesn’t often happen by accident. Grouping and clustering facilitate the development of a culture in which an appropriate level of challenge is valued by learners and teachers alike.

To enable all children to learn as much as they can, rather than having many able learners mark time during their school years. The knowledge and skills gained will benefit the children as individuals, and will later benefit the various communities they contribute to.

To demonstrate the true size of the problem of inadequate educational provision for gifted children in order to seek change.

So should we do this? Should we identify as many learners from each end of the bell curve as unlikely to have their needs met by the routine delivery of curriculum? If we don’t, then my mathematics says we must logically believe that routine delivery of curriculum is pitched above the average. Do you see any evidence of that?

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It seems entirely appropriate to wind up this year’s enormously successful blog tour with another contribution from a gifted child. Caila is one of Gifted Online’s youngest students, but she is already beginning to articulate her own ideas about creativity. Children’s experiences of creativity are hugely important for them, as they are enjoyable and contribute to a sense of personal efficacy. They are also very important for society, as children’s creativity is the precursor of adult creativity, and adult creativity solves problems which affect us all.

The introduction of National Standards has reduced the opportunities for creativity in many classrooms. This is not the case in every classroom. However, we should be concerned about those classrooms where assessment requirements are leading to a narrowing of educational focus in which convergent thinking dominates over opportunities to think and learn in creative ways. Please consider children’s opportunities to think creatively, and the many other important aspects of education raised in this year’s very successful #NZGAW Blog Tour, when you vote this year.

And now, over to Caila:

Hi everyone!

This is about my picture that explains ‘What does it mean to be creative?’

So this is a drawing of a girl thinking and lots of LEGO bricks whizzing around her. The LEGO is creating her idea.

There is a lot of talk these days about under achievement within our education system. The rhetoric goes that we need to spend more time measuring kids so that we can better identify which students are falling behind and devote more resources and support to them so that they can “catch-up” with the others.

The problem with this whole approach is it presumes that every child has the same capabilities, that all children should be learning the same things at the same time, and that the end goal for our education system is the production of standardised ‘units of labour’ for the workforce. It couldn’t be more wrong.

Any child who isn’t achieving to their full potential is under achieving, and that means that gifted kids who are well ahead of the class could still be “under-achievers” if they aren’t being challenged and extended.

The Labour Party recognises the great diversity that exists within our education system. We want every child to be supported to achieve their individual and unique potential. We don’t need to spend more time constantly assessing and measuring, we know what needs to be done, let’s get on and do it.

Labour will re-establish the Gifted and Talented Advisory Board to advise on best practice and advocate on behalf of gifted kids. They will be given a ring-fenced budget for research and will be supported by a dedicated unit within the Ministry of Education.
We will also ring-fence funding for specific professional development programmes for teachers that are aimed at better supporting the needs of gifted learners, and we will restore funding for specific programmes like the One Day School.

Labour has a proven track record when it comes to supporting programmes for gifted and talented students, and we intend to pick up where we left off. The 2014 general election is your opportunity to put gifted and talented education back on the political agenda.